Watered Down (Water: H20=Life at the AMNH)

A spherical video projection explains water on a global scale.

Water: H20=Life
American Museum of Natural History
Nov. 3, 2007 - May 26, 2008

Hey, kids, it's the latest one-word blockbuster show at the Natural History museum! Remember Pearls (2001), Chocolate (2003) and Gold (2006)? This one's all about water. No, water's not boring, sweetie, it's a precious resource and the source of all life on this planet. Some places like Africa don't have access to clean water like we do. Poor women there have to carry heavy jugs on their heads for many miles just so their families don't die of horrible diseases. Yes, you should feel lucky you were born on the Upper West Side.

Arranged along a winding, river-like path, "Water" overflows with facts and figures, interactive and multimedia displays, and on the Sunday we visited, human beings -- including plenty of children.

The first quarter the exhibit is about water's natural role -- without getting into any biology or chemistry -- how it supports life and shapes the environment. Hey, look, it's a mudskipper!

The rest of the show engages the Big Issue -- how humans are screwing things up.

Culprits identified include massive dam projects (in China), industrial agriculture and fishing, climate change (those poor polar bears), bottled water and antibacterial soap. Not much on the toxicities of manufacturing or the military.

I was surely influenced by the crush of the crowd, but I came away even more convinced that we have a serious overpopulation problem. An oil-fueled kudzu, our species is slurping up the planet.

The exhibit's solutions -- no mentions of condoms -- include buried drip irrigation, creating artificial wet lands for water purification and "harvesting" the power of the ocean's currents. They also borrowed a couple inventions from the excellent Cooper-Hewitt show of last year "Design for the Other 90%" -- such as a rolling water container and a purification straw. Oh, and call your local legislative official!

The show concludes by profiling various local water heroes -- such as the Bronx River Alliance (hurray) the designer of The Solaire eco-lux apartments (boo) and a New Paltz high schooler who gave up bottled water (woah, major sacrifice).

I'll hand it to the museum. At least the show isn't underwritten by Aquafina or Dasani. But is the major sponsor, J.P. Morgan, much better? And all that bank money and I still had to shell out $26 for one 2:30 p.m. timed ticket.

While well intentioned, "Water" feels too much like Disney ride, tacky and watered-down for the kids. Worth it? No.

Notes:
The New York Times: "...a free-flowing flood of data [that] has an overly insistent and predictable message."

Museum Minutes

• The Whitney's Altria outpost on Park and 42nd is closing as Philip Morris relocates. Best to leave behind that carcinogenic chapter in the Whit's history. [NYSun]

• What's with these thieving SoCal Museums? First the Getty and now four more are being investigated for knowingly buying stolen antiquities: Bowers Museum, Pacific Asia Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Mingei International Museum. This time it's objects from Thailand and American Indians. [LATimes]

• The Film Museum of Iran plans a seminar on cinema of Weimar Germany to "examine subjects such as the reflections of the colonialist outlook with regards to culture and Eastern countries." [Tehran Times]

• Kanye West performed at the Flavor Pill party at the American Museum of Natural History and Devendra Banhart played the SF MoMA [NYTimes, SF Weekly]

• Oh, Cali, you may be crooks, but at least you're fun: John Baldessari answers phones at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. [LATimes]
  

MoMA's Contemporary Feminine Side (Multiplex: Directions in Art, 1970 to Now)

"Now" (1973) by Lynda Benglis

Multiplex: Directions in Art, 1970 to Now
MoMA
Nov. 21, 2007 – July 28, 2008

The MoMA in particular has been criticized for overlooking and excluding art made by women. Memorably, Jerry Saltz has tackled the issue, most recently last November, finding female representation at the museum well under 10 percent (he counted 15 percent at the Whitney, and 1 percent at the Frick).

MoMA's new contemporary show seems to attempt a corrective. I count 38 men and 29 women (43 percent!), and the show's curated by a woman, Deborah Wye, the museum's chief curator of prints and books. There also seems to be more wall text dedicated to women.

And a talented group of women it is, with marquee names like Barbara Kruger, Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holtzer, Lisa Yuskavage, Elizabeth Murray, Louise Bourgeois and Kiki Smith.

Exhibited in the museum's second-floor contemporary art galleries, the show, culled from MoMA's collection, stakes a claim to define contemporary art, stating that it began in 1970. Why 1970? What happened that killed capital-M Modern art?

This show hints at the answer by presenting several different currents in contemporary art. Awkwardly titled Multiplex (don't think Loews, think different wavelengths on one frequency), it's loosely divided into three sections: Abstractions, Mutability and Provocation. Overall, it's about plurality and multiplicity.

Unlike, modernism, which was, ahem, more rigid.

Which leads us to a tongue-in-cheek floor sculpture by Lynda Benglis called "Modern Art Number 1" depicting two blobs -- one aluminum and one bronze. We're to assume it's two modern sculptures (by men) melted down.

So, maybe it's the women. After all, 1970 was prime time for feminism. Benglis herself was a pioneer, challenging gender norms in her work, which includes video performances. She may be best remembered for by posing nude with a dildo in mid-70s Art Forum.

In fact, it's possible to see a good deal of feminist art at this show. From the 70s, there's explicitly political work by Benglis, Ree Morton and Nancy Spero, the latter whose "Notes in Time" -- a large paper work depicting women's struggles throughout history -- is given its own room. (Incidentally, you can see Spero's work in mural form at the Lincoln Center subway stop.) From the 1980s, there's Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger. More recently, and less explicitly feminist is Lisa Yuskavage, whose painting "Wrist Corsage" depicts an nude woman with a massive derrière, done in a soft-focus children's storybook style. Work by noteworthy newcomers Sarah Lucas and Rachael Harrison also deals with gender issues.

Maybe my favorite work by a woman artist in the show is by Louise Bourgeois. (Ms. Wye is an authority on her work.) "Articulated Lair" (2006) is a circular room created using folding panels. Inside is a space marked by ambiguous, slightly ominous and slightly phallic rubber shapes hanging from the wall like evil surrealist sausages. Strongly informed by Freudian psychoanalysis, Bourgeois creates in this installation an interplay between feelings of safety and refuge and violence and repression.

In an interesting small show upstairs, the MoMA more explicitly casts a critical eye on itself. 75 Years of Architecture at MoMA addresses the history of the museum's take on architecture, noting that Philip Johnson and Henry Russell Hitchcock's monumental MoMA exhibit and book, which defined the steel and glass International Style in 1932, actually excluded many other modernisms.

One of these other modernisms is the so-called organicism of Buckminster Fuller and Frank Lloyd Wright.

The show goes on to tell how, in the 60s and 70s, Johnson and Hitchcock's successor, Arthur Drexler, moved away from the sterile International Style, putting on shows about urbanism and the Beaux-Arts movement.

The exhibit has a nice collection of architectural drawings and models, including a wall dedicated to drawings by acid-drenched 60s "visionary architects" like Peter Cook and Haus Hollein.

But as far as I could tell, not a single female architect! No Denise Scott Brown, Susana Torre or Zaha Hadid.

One last thing, I stupidly missed the Martin Puryear show, but his large-scale sculptural works in the big second-floor space are stunning. There's a giant wagon wheel and a latter to the sky called "Ladder for Booker T. Washington."

Hit the Road, Jack (Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac at the NYPL)

Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac on the Road
The New York Public Library
Nov. 9, 2007 - March 16, 2008

According to our excellent tour guide, Keith, Jack Kerouac loved the New York Public Library main branch -- who doesn't, really? -- and always wanted his papers archived there. His wish came true as the Library was able to buy the majority of it from his third wife and heir, Stella Sampas.

One thing they didn't get was The Scroll, the 120-foot typewritten initial draft of On the Road. This celebrated icon of Kerouac and the Beat Generation belongs to James Irsay, owner of the National Football League's Indianapolis Colts, who bought it at auction for $2.43 million in 2001.

In town only until the Feb. 22, The Scroll is itself on the road, an international tour that began in 2004 and ends next year. (Last year was the 50th anniversary of On the Road's publication.)

Enormously popular and influential, Kerouac doesn't get a lot of respect. Like J.D. Salinger and Charles Bukowski, he's someone you read in high school and college, perhaps inspiring a crazy road trip or two, and then toss aside for more sophisticated literary reading (or maybe no reading at all).

Like everyone else, I read On the Road and Dharma Bums at age 15. I tried and failed to read his other, stylistically looser, books. But maybe most of all, I enjoyed Ann Charter's biography. More than his words, we love Kerouac for the sad, crazy life he lead and his memorable circle of talented friends.

It's this life, that's on display, illustrated by everything Jack held onto. There's a valentine he did at 11 years old for his mother, who he took care of and sometimes lived with his entire life. There are photos of his friends, including Sebastian Sampas, a friend from his Lowell, Massachusetts, high school days and brother to Kerouac's third wife; Henri Cru, who he met at Horace Mann in the Bronx, where he took mandatory catch-up classes before enrolling at Columbia; and, of course, the famous personages central to the 1940s Beat golden age, including Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, the latter with whom he shared an apartment on Morningside Heights, and Neil Cassidy, the larger-than-life figure that inspired On the Road. There are notebooks, including one with a long list of every woman he'd slept with (none of the men were included). Also on display are Kerouac's religious-themed paintings, some depicting his infatuation with Buddhism, and others his return to Christianity. You can also listen to a recording of Charlie Parker, whose energetic be-bop improvisations served as a model for Kerouac's writings.

This brings us back to The Scroll, half of which is rolled out in its single-spaced one-long-paragraph glory. If you want to read it, you're better advised to get your hands on the bound volume that was released last year.

According to legend, it took Jack three weeks in 1951 to finish the scroll, cranking it out at a Benzedrine-fueled 100+ words per minute from an walk-up apartment in Chelsea. Initially rejected, it wasn't published for another seven years and numerous revisions. Sentences were shortened, paragraphs added, characters names put in code (the original, really a fictionalized memoir, used the names of the real people -- Neil, Allen, Bill, etc.)

A very different book about a time in Kerouac's life a decade prior, On the Road when it was released deeply resonated with an America tired of the starched shirt white-bread Eisenhower years (incidentally, before becoming President, Ike was president of Columbia University). This America was yearning for some fun -- the open road, sex, boozing, even some bohemianism. The book was a sensation, beginning with fawning review in the New York Times that compares the "Beat Generation" to Hemmmingway's Lost Generation. A few months later, the word beatnik was coined by a journalist to describe how these crazy new bohemians, like Sputnik, flew into your party, drank your liquor and quickly whizzed off.

Kerouac was a celebrity. And like many, he couldn't take the attention, felt misunderstood and proceeded to drink himself to death. It took him a little more than 10 years -- enough time to bitterly see Ginsberg and Cassidy take staring roles in the hippie sixties.

On a happier note, maybe the most surprising artifacts on display are Kerouac's fantasy sports games. As a teen, he invented a horse-racing game played with marbles and a baseball game played with cards, the later he continued to entertain himself with throughout his life. Not only that, but as a teen, he invented newspaper stories about the races, written and laid out in the style of racing form. All, presumably, without the help of Benzedrine.

For a Saturday afternoon, the show wasn't exactly packed with people. I'm sure there were crowds during its opening weeks, but I don't think it's a blockbuster hit. Not that I like crowds, but it would be nice to think of more people rediscovering their adolescent infatuation with Kerouac and company -- and with this beautiful (and beatific) treasure of a Library. They'll get another chance as the NYPL has an even bigger Burroughs archive, which will likely get its own show before too long.

More on Kerouac's scroll by Vanity Fair and the Boston Globe.

Let's Talk About Why They Were Disturbing (Richard Prince at the Guggenheim)

"Nurse of Greenmeadow," 2002

Richard Prince: Spiritual America
Guggenheim Museum
Sept. 28 - Jan. 9, 2008.

Stopped by the Gug to check out the Prince retrospective before it closed. I wasn't expecting to like it, and mostly I didn't. But I like that it was called "Spiritual America," big pretentious title and makes you think about Prince and, well, America. That is, you think about it until you want to throw yourself off the vertigo-enducing spiral and into the white void center of the Gug's Ron Perlman rotunda. (Incidentally, Spiritual America is also the name of a creepy re-photo Prince did of the infamous pedophiliac Brooke Shields.)

Good for you, Richard Prince! Not only did you survive the 80s and move beyond the re-photography technique that put you in the art history books, but your photos are setting auction records. And now the Gug.

I understand the appeal of the Marlboro man photos. Cowboys, death, commodification, appropriation, objectification -- all sexy and cool. Although, honestly, only one or two of them are visually exciting.

But the joke paintings? Please! These are so horrible. Tacky, 80s.

What about the newer stuff like the nurse paintings? How about this -- we overheard some dad telling his kid in sotto voice, "okay, now let's talk about why they were disturbing."

Hey pops, maybe it's all the retro-sexist pulp images made up like a horror show?

Spiritual America is a spiritual void. But, notsofast--isn't this what hipster-trickster Prince has in mind? Isn't that skin-crawling creepy feeling we get looking at his art his intention?

Perhaps Prince doth protest too much? Does he look in the cracked mirror of American wasteland and see himself? Is his ugly art, more ugly than art?

Prince is conjuring a sad, demented America. But the fact remains that, for the most part, there's nothing happening -- no cultural critique, no frission between critique and celebration, no dance of deconstrucitivism. Braindead.

But critics like it, the market likes it. Maybe it's a sign of the times. Ugliness, goth and self-hate are big in these Bush years.

An exception was Prince's Upstate New York photos -- lyrically lonesome landscapes of doughnut tire tracks and a basketball hoop in an overgrown field. And the Jimi Hendrix checks used in a couple of the more recent joke paintings made for a lovely color field. (I copied down his address, in case you want to send him a note: Box 12, Rensselaerville, NY.)

All in all, the show resonated nicely with my negative feelings about the mismanaged museum. Prince and Guggenheim are a good fit. The joke's on us.

One more thing. We noticed that many of the prints on display were labeled as exhibition prints. After polling a few museum staffers, it seems these are one-offs that aren't part of the original series and intended only for this show. (I guess the Hollywood collector types weren't willing to lend their precious Princes, even to the Gugg.) After the show these exhibition prints are meant to be destroyed. Maybe there's a bonfire happening somewhere right now. That I'd like to see!

Notes:
Roberta Fallon (artblog): "How can a car compete with the aesthetics of this museum? My head turned away from my Prince and to my Guggenheim at every bend in the road."

Roberta Smith (NYTimes): "...the path of a brilliant artist whose sense of visual style is matched by an ear for language, as he progresses from hip, hermetic mind games to hip, inclusive generosity and even tenderness."